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Wednesday Round Up #120

This week I am trying to streamline things behind the scenes, so you still get your links and I keep a little more sanity in terms of time and other things to do. The most obvious transformation here is that this week there are no categories, except the top of the list.

I’ve also put little dashes in front of the write-ups at top. Things look a little different here on PLoS, and I think that might enhance readability. I tried to look for an easy way to indent, didn’t see it, so that’s what I did at the top. So comments on how to indent, on dashes vs. indent, or anything else most welcome!

The cartoon comes from XKCD, a great webcomic of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” and is entitled Raptor Fences. Ah, the power of epigenetics… Click on it to go to that comic, or here is the general link to XKCD.

Top of the List

Gretchen Reynolds, Phys Ed: Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter?
-YES!! Great experimental research, with controls, tests, and even fMRIs. And then larger studies that establish good effect at the population level.

We review evidence that the collectivistic and individualistic biases of East Asian and Western cultures, respectively, affect neural structure and function. We conclude that there is limited evidence that cultural experiences affect brain structure and considerably more evidence that neural function is affected by culture, particularly activations in ventral visual cortex—areas associated with perceptual processing.

Foundation for Psychocultural Research, Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorders – Opening Session
-The Foundation for Psychocultural Research presents the first of its retrospective overviews of its interdisciplinary conference “Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder” – the opening session included several of the heavy hitters that presented at the conference.

Walter Jessen, Hair Cortisol as a Predictive Biomarker for Heart Attack
Could be a cool new biomarker, easier to access than cortisol in blood or saliva. “Hair analysis provides a long-term measurement of cortisol production; cortisol can be incorporated into hair and remain stable for at least a 6 month period.”

John Rennie, Creationist Blarney
Now we have science ministers promoting creationism. Damn. John does the good and necessary service, and with style too:

We can all find a favorite reason on that list [of reasons to reject evolution], but mine is definitely #5, because it opened my eyes to the fact that evolution is both toxic and poisonous, and that in its evil capacity as a mind virus it attacks the heart’s immune system, which protects us against hope and common sense, although I think he means that hope and common sense are good things. In any case: enlightening!

“A neural model of this task [16] establishes how changing a single parameter, namely the strength of the connections between the neural layer providing the momentary evidence and the layer integrating the evidence over time, captures improvements in action-gamers behavior.”

Jason Goldman, Origins of Mind 101
Rene Descartes vs. George Berkeley, or the philosophical roots of psychology in the debate over the role of innate factors versus experience in the formation of the mind

The saga of the almost invincible Mike, the improbably cursed murder syndicate, and the investigation that sent all four of those card players to the electric chair, is probably my favorite true crime story from The Poisoner’s Handbook. It’s Alfred Hitchcock material, a dark comedy of errors, or the stuff of Greek tragedy, with Nemesis hovering nearby. It’s a classic example of that familiar saying: you couldn’t make it up.

Read to the finish! It is worth it, in its own electric way.

Nicholas Wade, Tug of War Pits Genes of Parents in the Fetus
Fascinating research on how imprinting by father or mother’s genes can affect body size and brain size in mice – plus the growing recognition that there is much more imprinting than previously thought

Science and the City Podcasts
The NY Academy of Sciences has some good podcasts of late, including science journalist Stephen Hall and neuroscientist Andre Fenton discussing what makes us wise and Richard Restak on exercise and the brain

Sarah Curtis, Space, Place and Mental Health
Starting from health psychology, “which conceptualises space and place in ways that provide a distinctive focus on the interactions between people and their social and physical environment,” the book presents an interdisciplinary theoretical approach and then examines:

how our mental health is associated with material, or physical, aspects of our environment (such as ‘natural’ and built landscapes), with social environments (involving social relationships in communities), and with symbolic and imagined spaces (representing the personal, cultural and spiritual meanings of places).

Michael Powell, From Consumers, To Shoppers
We’re not consumers anymore, finding what we want through advertising. Most of us are discovering things in ACTUAL STORES. And that leaves a wide-open door for ethnography, both theoretically and for business

Casey Rantz, The Science Blogging Square Dance
If you’re looking for a guide to all the shake-up and innovation going on in science blogging, this post provides an efficient overview of the last few months. Just also add Wired Science Blogs too!

The close fit between languages and language learners, which make language acquisition possible, arises not because humans possess a specialized biological adaptation for language, but because language has been shaped to fit the brain, a process of cultural evolution.